My grandmother has frontal lobe degeneration. Her short term memory is gone and her long term memories are almost gone. The most disturbing thing as of late is that she thinks my dad is her boyfriend. He looks like his dad and has the same name so it's kind of understandable. How do we handle this while upsetting her as little as possible?
You can get a lot of family history while leading her to happier times.
"OMG cloth diapers! How did you?" "How did you make formula?"
I don't know if this site supports outside links, but here we go: youtube/watch?v=zifeVbK8b-g If it doesn't work, go to youtube and search for Elvis Costello (artist) and Veronica (song)
It's a losing battle to try to keep an ALZ patient in the present; if they are happy reliving the past, it's like Pam said, take the opportunity to get some family history before it's gone for good.
And/or perhaps have your dad bring back memories that just the two of them had (that wouldn't involve your grandfather) - like childhood past times...games, rhymes, stories.
I'm sure it's upsetting and frustrating, but at least you can see she is trying to make mental connections with her current reality (which is not so good) with what she remembers of the past.
It's a tribute to both grandparents that she misses your grandfather so much. We don't see love like that much nowadays. That may not help you in the short term, but it's still very sweet. She can't help that she's confused.
Allow her to live her wonderful happy past and go with it. It would be wonderful to have more of these towns cities as in the Netherlands. But in this country it's money. Children want to be left huge estates, and want the welfare system to pay for all. I would love to see more of these towns... Do you know how many people in nursing homes that have relationship and marry it does happen and they have those rights.
Music and dancing old memories just enjoy it.. It can be hard but they can't change this behavior... It's hard on the spouse that feels lost and that they are no longer important but they can try to just act as friends with them...Get the other person spouse involved in other things. Get them into senior group so he's not forgotten.
Let you and your Dad go with it, it's making here happy to live in the past.. Does it really matter.. Make her happy in her past..
How long has she had this belief? I know that my cousin, who as significant dementia, goes through phases of mistaking people for other people. For a few weeks, she thought one of her female roommates was an old male friend It didn't hurt anything, so I didn't correct her. It would do no good. She stopped believing that after a few weeks. Now she believes another lady in the Memory Care unit is a man, but she's not. She's a lady, but I don't correct her. She will usually change her mind eventually. So, your mom may as well.